Peter Kogler/Marcus Geiger

Staircase Wall Installation (2000)

The wall installation in the west wing of Danube University Krems was realised by Peter Kogler and Marcus Geiger in connection with the opening of the Department for Cultural Studies. It consists of the “motif” of the bubble as a biomorphic form that stretches in a labyrinthine manner through the entire space of the staircase. The installation should be viewed in correspondence with the staircase installation by Peter Kogler in the Kunsthalle Krems (“Krems Art Hall”).

The starting point for the work was the “variation of one and the same basic motif that is transferred to wallpaper. The complex pattern is generated using digital methods” (Suzanne Prinz). Kogler, who had already begun to work with the medium computer at the beginning of the eighties and has realised several artistic projects since 1995 with Marcus Geiger (Geiger is primarily responsible for the colours), is developing a form of extended painting, which conveys not so much the experience of a picture as the experience of a space. In a similar way to Baroque architectural painting, for example, the “picture” is part of the space and vice versa. Crossing the border between picture and space, which is familiar to us from art and especially from painting in the 20th century since cubism, is forced further with the wall installation. Spatial situations arise that not only further dissolve all the traditional parameters (above, below, left, right, no foreground and background, no central perspective) but become spaces for the observer to undergo a genuine experience beyond perception.

The work of Peter Kogler and Marcus Geiger belongs to the “postmedial painting” (Peter Weibel) developing in the eighties which, characterised by the new media, realises their possibilities again and again in the complex forms of an installation. One of the central issues of this process is the mental relationship of virtual (digital) and real space and its possibilities for creating perceptive links. The formal work, which is also reminiscent of cell structures, is based on a circulatory moment of repetition that consciously corresponds with the staircase as a situation of passage through space. (Mag. Carl Aigner, Director of the Lower Austria Provincial Museum)